Hello,

I am trying to install the latest version of policykit so that the updates will correct a problem with mountable devices.

My linux-fu is weak.

I have downloaded the .tar.gz to My Downloads but when I try to follow the install procedure I found here:
http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/softinstall.html

I reached the point of ./configure and it all went wrong

Any ideas?

This is what terminal had to say about it:
[user@localhost PolicyKit-0.9]$ ./configure
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for a thread-safe mkdir -p... /bin/mkdir -p
checking for gawk... gawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... no
checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no
checking for style of include used by make... none
checking for gcc... no
checking for cc... no
checking for cl.exe... no
configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH
See `config.log' for more details.
[user@localhost PolicyKit-0.9]$

Looks like gcc isn't installed. Have you looked in config.log to see what other clues were left? Also,what distro are you using and did you do a full install? By the way, if your linux-fu is still under construction, are you really sure you want to be messing with policykit? Have you investigated how it was originally compiled into your distro? I suspect that this is one place where you could bork your install, so if you do proceed, make sure anything valuable is backed up.

Forget about the tar.gz file - use your distro's package manager.

I probably shouldn't be messing about with it but I've not got much choice.

I'm running Linpus Lite. I've not done much to it beyond installing a few programmes (gimp, vlc) and updating firefox and openoffice.

I ran the 'liveupdate' function a few months ago and since then I've had no end of problems.

I've decided to get rid of Linpus and install something else (probably fedora 13 as most people seem to have had little trouble installing it on the aspire one, from what I've seen).

But, before I can do that I want to back up my files (I'm a teacher and have a lot of stuff from old schools that I dip into). Unfortunately it won't mount any removable drives.

All I want to do is get that working so I can retrieve things and it seems that PolicyKit.conf is the problem.

I've tried editing with nano but that hasn't worked so I thought the update might do the trick.

Rock Doctor: thanks for the advice but the package manager doesn't carry any updates, Acer's support for Linpus is pretty minimal.

The config.log is huge and I don't really understand it.

Part of the reason I got a linux machine was so that I could look at linux and have a tinker but after two years I has got complacent about backing stuff up.

If anyone can suggest an alternative workaround to mount usb sticks or sd cards then that would suit me fine.

Thanks for the help.

Can you describe what you do and what happens when you do try to mount a usb stick or sd card? There might be a solution that doesn't involve policykit. Another alternative might be to boot from a live distro on a USB stick and then use that to copy files of the hard drive. If you haven't seen it already, unetbootin is an easy way to create a bootable USB stick.

Failed to mount "memory stick name"
org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable no <-- (action, result).

That's the message I get.

If I boot from a usb stick could I still retrieve my files?
What distro would you reccomend?
I've got a 16gb usb stick, would that be big enough?

Thanks, Hangdog

Most of the live USB distros I've played around with automatically mount the internal hard drives, so you should be able to copy the files to a new location pretty easily. 16GB should be MORE than plenty, in fact if you go with a smaller distro, a 2GB stick would be fine. If you can use 2 USB sticks, that might be better (one to boot and one to hold the files). I'm not sure how writeable the USB stick is once it is bootable. Be sure to check that the files you copied are readable before you nuke the borked computer.

As far as distros, I recently rescued a friends files from a Vista upgrade gone bad using Puppy Linux, and found that to be a nicely functional and very compact distro. I've also played with Linux Mint and found that nice. Both are available through unetbootin.

Another alternative would be to use FTP to copy the files to another computer. If you don't have an FTP server, FileZilla is a pretty easy one to use.

if OP are looking for a small distro to get the job of backup/copy stuff done, http://slitaz.org/ can be useful (it has only 30MB! and exists on unetbootin too)

Fedora boots fine from a USB stick. You'll have to mount the internal drive manually, but it will mount (as long as it's not corrupted). If you8 plutg in a second USB stick onto which your backup files will go, if it's already formatted, the second USB stick will be automounted.

Do not save your data in the persistent storage part of a live Fedora (or any other distro) on a USB stick! You'll only complicate the process of transferring the data back to your Aspire One